


Show You the World

by AsperJasper



Category: Newsies - All Media Types
Genre: Jack is a romantic, M/M, davey is going blind, i love them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-24
Updated: 2019-08-24
Packaged: 2020-09-25 04:14:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,143
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20370511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AsperJasper/pseuds/AsperJasper
Summary: When Davey was little, his eye doctors had been hopeful that his vision wouldn’t get too bad. As he got older, they got less hopeful, and by the time he was twenty, they’d told him he’d probably be unable to see anything more than light and dark by the time he was thirty.He met Jack when he was twenty-five and had to wear glasses as thick as his thumb to be able to see. He was an aspiring writer, somehow making a living in journalism while working on a book he hoped he could publish someday.Jack was an artist who’d suddenly made it big with one sale nobody could have predicted.





	Show You the World

When Davey was little, his eye doctors had been hopeful that his vision wouldn’t get too bad. As he got older, they got less hopeful, and by the time he was twenty, they’d told him he’d probably be unable to see anything more than light and dark by the time he was thirty.

He met Jack when he was twenty-five and had to wear glasses as thick as his thumb to be able to see. He was an aspiring writer, somehow making a living in journalism while working on a book he hoped he could publish someday.

Jack was an artist who’d suddenly made it big with one sale nobody could have predicted.

At first, Davey was worried his vision had gotten worse since he woke up when he saw the painting in question. The colors were nice, but the shapes were hard to make out and honestly he had no idea how it was supposed to be a cityscape, though that’s what the label called it.

He hadn’t realized he’d already found the artist when he’d said that out loud and the person standing next to him started laughing out loud.

“You know, I almost didn’t put this one up for sale. I painted it in two hours at three am. I like the others much better, but hey, if you have enough money only ugly is worth it.”

Jack was much closer to a work of art than the painting they were standing in front of, in Davey’s opinion. He was dressed up for the occasion, some fancy gala hosted by the person who bought his painting, and he looked like he fit right in with the crowd around them. When he laughed, he threw his head back, and his hair quickly escaped the styling he’d obviously spent time on and left him with curls falling in his face no matter how many times he pushed them away. His smile took over his entire face, making it easy to picture where the creases would form as he aged, and he never stopped moving. His hands fluttered when he talked, and when they ended up sitting next to each other near the end of the night, he was constantly tapping his fingers or jogging his leg. He was easy to talk to. Funny. Charismatic.

Easy on the eyes, too.

Davey had always looked at his vision loss philosophically. He might have been going blind, but he’d had plenty of years to see things, and he’d chosen and was enjoying a career that he didn’t really need sight for. There were people who had it worse, and he had managed to stay pretty content with his lot in life.

But he was glad he got to see Jack Kelly.

Jack seemed glad to see him too, if their conversation was anything to judge by.

Jack made a joke, and reached out to brush Davey’s hair away from his face. Jack listened to what Davey had to say, and leaned in close in a way that could be excused by the noise around them but just a little bit closer than necessary.

And when the party was finally dying down, which Davey was surprised to notice since he’d been planning on leaving long before most people, Jack extended his arm and an offer to walk Davey home.

And like something out of a movie, or a scene Davey would never write into a book because it just seemed too cheesy, Jack kissed him outside his apartment’s door. There was a florescent bulb flickering overhead, and Jack gently cupped Davey’s cheek and stayed so close when he pulled back that Davey could feel his breath, and then squeezed Davey’s hand before letting go.

He put his number in Davey’s phone with a heart-eyes emoji and responded immediately when Davey texted him.

And dating Jack Kelly was the easiest thing in the world.

He hadn’t quite expected it to be, the first time Jack had asked if he wanted to go out. He’d kind of expected it to be awkward and weird and probably to fizzle out after a couple of dates. And instead, Jack asked Davey on a first date and it was to a planetarium and Jack whispered facts the program didn’t include into Davey’s ear. He held Davey’s hand and took him for ice cream while the sun was setting. They walked the High Line and Jack picked a flower and tucked it into Davey’s shirt pocket.

“You know, I forgot that I’m lactose intolerant,” Jack said thoughtfully, looking down at the last bite of his ice cream cone. After a second, he shrugged and popped it into his mouth. “Oh well.”

“Oh, well?”

“I’ll take a pill when I get home. Ice cream is too good to live without, you know.” He smiled and took Davey’s hand again, both of their fingers sticky from melted ice cream.

They dated for almost two months before Davey fully explained his eyesight.

Jack didn’t do the annoying thing a lot of people did where he suddenly started treating Davey differently, or throwing Davey a pity party he didn’t ask for.

Davey knew he would be blind eventually. He’d known that for a long time, and he was used to it.

Instead, Jack asked a couple of questions about it, and then he asked one Davey had thought about a lot but never been asked by anybody else.

“What do you want to see?”

“What do you mean?”

“You have time, right? So what do you want to see before you can’t?”

Davey listed off a few places, a few sights that had always been on on his bucket list, and Jack hummed thoughtfully, and then their conversation had moved on and Davey pretty much forgot about it.

Until he found an envelope slid under his door with a hastily written note covering a little doodle obviously done by Jack.

I wanted to see your face but I had to literally run but I know you’ll be home soon so happy Start of Jack’s Grand Plan.

Davey opened the envelope not exactly sure of what to expect. A clue to a scavenger hunt, maybe. A sweet drawing, a longer note, something small and sweet and romantic, the type of gesture Jack loved to give.

There wasn’t any kind of note. Not a single doodle in sight, other than the one on the envelope which Davey was pretty sure was somebody feeding the pigeons in the park.

Davey opened the envelope and pulled out two plane tickets.

Round trip, three days and two nights, from JFK to Flagstaff Pulliam Airport.

And under the tickets in the envelope was printed off receipt for a two night stay in the Grand Hotel at the Grand Canyon.

And then there was a small piece of paper with a list of places with a bold strikethrough cutting through “Grand Canyon” at the top with a bunch of other places listed underneath.

Five minutes into reading and rereading the tickets and the room receipt over and over again, Davey’s phone rang with the ringtone Jack had picked for himself (a frankly very strange cover of Never Gonna Give You Up that made everyone do a double take when it rang in public).

“Hey! I wanted to wait for you but Crutchie called and said he was having an emergency.” Davey could hear the smile in Jack’s voice and also Crutchie yelling something about fresh baked cookies very much warranting the emergency label Jack Kelly they needed to be enjoyed warm. “Do you like it? They’re far enough out that I can move them if the dates don’t work, but I’m pretty sure they do.”

“Jacky…I…you can’t-“

“Already did. Davey, I sold a painting for enough money that I bought an apartment. In Manhattan. And then I sold another painting for even more money. I want to spend it on something good. And you’re good. Plus, I get to go too. It’ll be wonderful, Davey darling, and you can’t convince me otherwise.”

Davey heard Crutchie say something to Jack and Jack laugh in response.

“Crutchie says if you don’t go he’ll go in your place and that would be weird because we’re brothers so you have to go.”

Davey laughed back.

“And you know you want to see the Grand Canyon. And it’ll be fun to get away for a little while. And-“

“Okay, okay, Jack, I’ll go with you.”

“We’ll hash out the details later, then. Love you, Davey, but more cookies came out of the oven three minutes ago and if I don’t start eating them soon Crutchie might murder me and that would spoil everything, now wouldn’t it?”

So they went to the Grand Canyon for the first week of April, and it was absolutely wonderful. Jack was wonderful, the trip was wonderful, and the view was wonderful and everything was wonderful.

And two months after that, Jack handed him a birthday card and inside of it were two tickets to Paris that Jack excused with “I’m going anyway for a show, so you might as well come, too.”

And over the next three years, Davey got tickets to Moscow, Hawaii, Yosemite. They drove to Maine and went through Niagara Falls on the way home. When they moved in together, Jack hung a bigger version of Jack’s Grand Plan on the wall and made a big dramatic deal out of crossing out every place they went to.

Davey laughed at every speech and pretended to protest every time Jack planned a new trip, but he knew he wouldn’t win any argument against going and he didn’t really want to stop going, either. He loved going on trips with Jack. He loved that Jack was determined to show him as much of the world as possible and wouldn’t take no for an answer.

How did he get so lucky?

Slowly, though, his vision was getting worse. He was getting tunnel vision, not in the figurative sense but in a very literal sense, and by the time he was twenty-nine, he finally stopped being able to see anything other than light and dark.

There was one stop left on Jack’s Grand Plan, and Davey was sure it wasn’t going to happen, but Jack still insisted.

So even though Davey wouldn’t be able to see the sights, he and Jack books tickets to Norway complete with a two day cruise in the fjords.

Jack was an artist, and he was just as good with verbal descriptions as drawings and paintings. He spent the entire trip describing absolutely everything he could see to Davey, from the outfits of the people around them to the towering stone surrounding them while they were on the boat.

It wasn’t exactly the same, but it was still pretty good.

Two weeks after they got home, Jack woke Davey up early and dragged him into the living room.

“I have a surprise and you’ll love it,” he said, offering no other explanation until Davey was sitting on the couch. “As you know, we recently completed the last stop on Jack’s Grand Plan. However, I can’t help but feel it wasn’t the same, and therefore, I have decided there has to be one last step before the plan can be declared complete. And that step happens…right now.”

Davey heard Jack pulling paper off of something.

Setting something down on the coffee table. Something big.

Jack took Davey’s hand and squeezed it before setting it down on the thing he’d put on the table.

It was rough. All ridges and texture, nothing smooth about it.

“It’s the fjords,” Jack said, obviously bursting with excitement. “It’s oil paints but it’s almost a sculpture instead of a painting, so you can touch it to see it. It doesn’t look like the fjords at all because I painted them and got the texture right and then added black on top because it’s meant to be touched, not seen.”

Davey ran his fingers over the entire painting, tracing the edges along the frame and feeling for details, surprised at how much he could identify. There was a patch at the bottom that felt the way choppy water looked, and tall patches of rough stone. Swirly clouds.

“It’s beautiful, Jack.”

“With that, Davey, Jack’s Grand Plan is complete. We’ve been to every place you listed, and you’ve seen them all. How was it?”

“Perfect, Jacky.”

Jack sat down next to him on the couch and kissed his cheek, wrapping his arms around Davey’s waist.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Cause I was thinking we could maybe do a couple repeats. I could paint more like this. Still get to go on vacation together all the time but this time call it a business expense.”

Davey laughed and leaned into Jack’s arms.

“Sounds perfect to me, Jacky.”

**Author's Note:**

> hey I'm Asper and I'm huge Gay and i love these boys
> 
> leave a comment if you liked it!
> 
> come hmu on tumblr @graybeard-halt!


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